The Happy Prisoner (23 page)

Guiltily, after he was settled, his mother stole into his room in her dressing-gown. He was lying looking out of the window, not sleeping, hardly breathing, trying not to think, just keeping everything as still as possible. His mother stumbled over something, so he switched on the bedside light. The plastic set was carefully pinned into a myriad Grecian whirls, highlights of cold cream larded her face, and she wore the cotton gloves in which she slept after she had greased her hands.

“I know I shouldn't come in,” she said, “because Elizabeth said you were to settle early, but really I think I might be allowed to judge what I can and can't do with my own son. You're perfectly all right, aren't you, darling? The party didn't make you feel bad?”

“Of course not, Ma, I'm fine,” he said. “Don't
fuss
.”

“It's Elizabeth who fusses, not me. I was a little sore with her tonight, when we were all having such a good time. I thought she was too, but she doesn't like to have your schedule upset; I suppose it's what they teach them in hospital. Maybe she's right, but—I don't know—she's such an odd girl. She works so well in the house and she couldn't be more careful with you.

She's good to me too, but–” She laughed. “It sounds kind of silly, but I don't even know if she likes me or not. It makes me nervous, d'you know it?” She suddenly gave a gasp. “Well, for heaven's sake! What d'you think I've forgotten? Your
thermos, darling. Fancy me forgetting your tea! You can't think much of me as a mother, when a little bit of excitement goes to my head and drives everything out of it. Silly old fool that I am.…” She started to go out, grumbling at herself.

“Don't bother now, Ma, for heaven's sake,” said Oliver, who wanted peace more than tea. “I don't think I shall wake tonight; I feel pretty sleepy.”

“You might, though, and then what would you think of me? It won't take long to boil the kettle,” she said from the door. “I'll be right back.”

When she came back with the thermos, she had remembered what she had originally come in to say. “Isn't it lovely to see Heather so happy?” she asked, making vicious efforts to tighten the thermos cap beyond its limit. “It's just as I said all along, you see, when everything seemed to get in her hair. She was only that way because she was missing John, though she wouldn't let on to it. And I'm not surprised; he's such a lovely person. And listen, darling, he may look perfectly fit, but that time in prison has told on him. There's a strain behind the eyes, I can see. I'm going to insist on his resting up and eating properly … I've been wondering whether I ought to have him see a doctor.” She was determined that not even John's rude health should cheat her of her debilitated prisoner. “I wonder what he thinks about her Turning,” she went on, untucking the bottom corner of Oliver's bed and retucking it. “Have either of them talked about it to you?”

“Why should they?” he said languidly. “It's no one else's business but theirs.”

“Except that Heather happens to be my daughter,” said his mother a little huffily, “and I want to know that nothing's going to spoil her happiness.” Her eyes took on their far-away gaze. She looked through the pince-nez into a mother's paradise. “I can't tell you how lovely it is to me to see them together. And those children … little David taking to his father at once, didn't you love it? He's going to look just like John, with those very black eyes.…” She rambled on, while Oliver waited patiently. She would stop some time, but the unaccustomed wine had stimulated her to even more than her ordinary nocturnal volubility. She began to make plans about Heather and John in Australia: where they would live, whether they would be able to afford servants, how soon David could start school, whether she might not combine visits to them with visits to Philadelphia.

“Go to bed,” Oliver said, coming back from a reverie to find her still talking. “You must be tired, Ma.”

“Don't worry about me, darling boy. You're the one we have to worry about. Can you imagine me forgetting your tea just because my son-in-law's come home? I can't get over it.” He knew she would come back after she had left him, but he did not know it would be to whisper in the dark: “Listen, dearest Ollie, don't think because I make a lot of song and dance about John and Heather that any of it means a thing to me compared to you recovering. I suppose I ought not to say this, but I would almost wish John dead in Malaya if that could give you back your leg again and your strong heart.”

Perhaps the novelty of John would have taken longer to wear off if he had not been at home so much. He had three months' leave, and by the end of the first month Heather was beginning to feel like a mother at the end of the school holidays. She was heard to remark that it was unnatural for a man to be in to lunch every day. John was not discontented or at a loose end. He asked nothing better than to be about the house and farm all day, reading and smoking and making marginal notes in his books, chatting sociably to anyone who felt like it, taking long striding walks with Violet's dogs and leaving muddy boots in the scullery, or bringing in an earthy head of celery which he thought would be nice for lunch just when the meal was being dished up. When Heather mentioned the boots, and muttered something about poor Mrs. Cowlin and no wonder there was class warfare, he sneaked oft' to the scullery to clean them himself. He could not find the shoe-box and did not like to ask, as he wanted it to be a surprise for Heather, so he used a table knife and a nailbrush and scraped the mud into what he took to be a bucket of dirty water instead of his daughter's underwear in soak.

He was a large man and he moved slowly. He had a habit of standing in doorways when people were coming along with trays. Oliver noticed that Heather sometimes looked irritated when she came into his room and found John ruminating there, particularly when he levered himself up for her or tried to take from her anything she was carrying. She adopted Oliver's expression of “I'm not paralysed”, which he used on his mother
when she wanted to fill his pipe or comb his hair or scoop out the inside of his baked potato. Oliver remembered, from the days when they used to go out, how John would fling wide a door for a woman as if she were twice the size, and how he would skip about so as always to be on the outside of the pavement. They had once taken a most unsettled walk along
the
grass strip between the traffic lanes of a by-pass. He used to put his hand under Heather's elbow to help her up steps or even up the gentle slope of a theatre aisle, and she would shake him off and tell him she was not a cripple, just as she did now, and he would laugh indulgently and do it again the next time, just as he did now. David had spilled cocoa over the housecoat and Heather had not yet sent it to be cleaned. She had begun to mention again the butter and sugar and chocolate, and after she had weighed John she mentioned it more frequently and frowned when she saw him plastering his bread unthinkingly with the butter ration. Oliver wondered whether John noticed the gradual waning of her first enthusiasm. He was never anything but amiable and pleasant and always ready to welcome the sudden impulses of either affection or compunction which caused her to fling herself at him declaring that he was sweet and she loved him. If she kissed him, he would hold up his cheek and screw up the side of his face to receive it. Oliver had never seen him kiss her on the lips in public.

When he went to London for the week-end, to see his mother and the manager of his firm, Heather tidied her room, which she and John now shared, the children being together in the spare room. Oliver heard her creaking about over his head all morning, opening and shutting drawers and cupboards, moving furniture, Hoovering, and he wondered how many of his things John would be able to find when he came back. Heather soon grew restless, however, and said several times: “I wonder what John's doing,” or: “Doesn't the house seem empty?” or to David: “Daddy will be home tomorrow.” After tea on Sunday, she started to wander in and out of Oliver's room saying: “Johnny should be here by six. I have missed him. Isn't it funny—in this short time I've got more used to having him about than I got used to not having him all those months he was away. Yet when he is here we don't seem to get on so well.”

“I never hear you fighting,” Oliver said.

“Of course not: he won't. You hear me snapping at him, though, and it just bounces back to me off him.”

“I suppose all husbands and wives get on each other's nerves at times,” said Oliver obligingly.

“But I don't get on his. At least, if I do, he doesn't show it. He doesn't show if he minds my snapping at him either, which makes me feel worse for doing it. It's just that I feel peevish, you know, Ollie, and because he's there he gets the brunt of it. But when he goes away I miss him. I feel I should have been charming all this week-end if he'd been here. I suppose that's the way love goes,” she said, without much conviction.

She lingered, balancing Oliver's tea-tray on one hip. She seemed to be in a tractable mood. You had to pick your moment carefully if you wanted to ask Heather things like: “What does he think of your being a Catholic? I had a sort of tentative, abstract talk with him the other day, and I must say he doesn't seem to have been brought up to see-much farther than the Thirty-Nine Articles. I don't imagine he approves?”

“Obviously not. He wrote that from Australia, but the silly part is, I don't get a chance to try and explain, because now he simply won't discuss it. He looks like a hurt dog when he sees me going off to church, but if I ever try to tell him how I feel about it, or what made me want to be a Catholic, he cricks his jaw sideways like he does when he feels grim about something and says: ‘You must do what you think is right. One person can't interfere with another's religion.' And though I'd bite his head off if he did, I almost wish he would in a way, because then I could feel martyred. St. Heather of Hinkley, persecuted for her faith. I should get a hell of a kick out of that. Heavens, is that the right time? I must go and make myself beautiful: he does like to see me done up.” She went away and Oliver heard her asking her mother if she had any Thawpit. She was going to try to get the cocoa stain out of the housecoat.

Six o'clock passed, and at seven Heather, who had been up and down the stairs countless times to look out of the front door, came into Oliver's room for a drink and said: “I
do
wish he'd come. What on earth d'you suppose has happened to him?”

“Train was probably held up,” said Oliver. “I shouldn't worry.”

“Good Lord, I'm not
worrying
. But I can't get David to sleep. John promised he'd see him in bed when he got home. I do think he might come.”

At eight o'clock David, struggling against drowsiness, fell asleep sitting up. Heather tucked him up and came downstairs to give them a pathetic description of David, white from exhaustion. “It's too bad of Johnny,” she said.

“He probably missed his train,” her mother told her. “Don't carry on so, Heather, as if no one had ever missed a train before.”

“He's not the sort of man who misses trains,” said Heather, “and if he had he'd have telephoned. He always thinks of doing things like that.”

“Perhaps the car wouldn't start at Shrewsbury,” Oliver suggested.

“Cars always start for him. He understands them.” She fidgeted about tensely, swishing the skirt of the housecoat. “Relax,” Violet grunted, but Heather became increasingly worried and soon infected her mother, who was always game for a spot of anxiety. “I'm sure something's happened to him; I've got a premonition,” Heather said, leaning across Oliver to peer out of the window, as if she expected to see John's ghost materialising on the moonlit lawn. “Fancy going through all that in Burma only to end up under the wheels of a London taxi,” she said dramatically.

“Don't be ridiculous, Heather,” said her mother, her mind instantly seizing and embroidering on the vision. “Besides, the hospital would have let us know. I put his name on all his shirts only last week.”

“If only I could get in
touch
with him at least he'd know I was worrying about him,” said Heather ingenuously. “Supposing there's been a train smash, Ma, or he got appendicitis, or lost his memory, from delayed shell-shock or something.” They discussed the ghoulish possibilities of John's fate until Violet asked with an enormous yawn: “How much longer are we going to wait dinner?”

“Let's have it, shall we?” said Mrs. North. “I can keep John's hot for him. Come along, Heather, it'll pep you up. We're having the pheasant, pot-roasted.”

“I couldn't eat a thing,” boasted Heather. “I think I'll go up and cuddle my babies.”

Violet snorted as she went out of the room. “Golly,” she said pityingly, “I wouldn't be put off roast pheasant because Fred was a couple of hours late. The other day, when he didn't come back for tea, I got sick of waiting and ate all the grub. When he came in starving there was nothing to eat; it was a scream.”

“I bet Fred didn't think so,” said Oliver.

“Oh, he didn't mind,” said Violet vaguely. “He had some bread or something.”

By half-past nine Heather was certain that John was dead, or at least dying. She switched from restlessness to wan courage. One had the feeling that she might go up soon and change the peacock-blue housecoat for black, with veiling. When her mother kept telling her that John's business had probably kept him another
night in town, Heather shook her head with a sad smile and repeated: “He would have rung up. He would never be so late without letting me know.” When her mother had gone out to satisfy herself that John's dinner was not drying up, Heather said to Oliver: “This is a judgment on me for not being nicer to him. I do wish I'd gone to the cinema with him yesterday when he asked me. I said I had to bath Susan, though I really could have left her to Elizabeth, and he went off so pathetically all by himself.”